gamma Soil Moisture Sensor-gSMS
Stationary Gamma-Ray Spectrometer
The Medusa gamma Soil Moisture Sensor (gSMS) is a gamma-ray spectrometer especially designed for stationary recording soil moisture content. The system is particularly designed for agricultural purposes. It is able to log the moisture content on an hourly basis and generates input for decision making on adding water to the field.
Description
The system is stand-alone and can be delivered with a solar panel to account for energy consumption. The height of the detector can be adjusted to the size of the field, however most commonly a detector height of 3 meters is used. The data recorded by the detector is automatically uploaded to a cloud service by an internal 4G connection.
The major advantage of this sensor over standard soil moisture sensors is the large field of view. The gSMS gives and average moisture content of an entire field.
Technology
Our MS-series of Gamma-ray spectrometers are used to measure several properties of agricultural fields on a regular basis. These measurements involve mapping of soil properties on various platforms, ranging from walking surveys to quad borne surveys, drone borne surveys or airborne surveys at large altitude. In this mapping, changes in soil moisture have a very small effect on the measured results. In general, these effects are so small that they are negligible. However with a precise stationary measurement, these changes can be measured.
To detect the gamma-rays a 100ml CsI scintilation crystal installed in the detector. To lower the power use the raw data is directly send through a data connection to a cloud service. It can be on a webserver, that provides access to the multiple functions of the device, i.e.
- Set-up of the system;
- Status view to inspect data and functioning of the system;
- Short and long measurement modes;
- Download view to allow retrieval of recorded data.
This webserver can be accessed via any standard webbrowser platform.
Advantages
- Measures average soil moisture of an area between 0.2 -1 hectare, depending on the height of installation
- Measures average soil moisture of the top 30 cm.
- Is independent of atmospheric conditions.
- Measures one sample per hour.
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Specifications
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General
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Year of introduction
2020
Typical (geophysics) Application
Landborne
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Embedded Processing
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Gain stablilsation
Software-based (natural peaks)
Spectrum analysis
FSA
Calibration
Monte-Carlo based
Output
Digitized waveforms, 2048 channel raw spectra, 300 channel 10 keV/chan spectra, 256 chan 12 keV/chan, Activity concentrations of 40-K, 232-Th, 238-U, 137-Cs (other nuclides on request)
Inspection
Webserver based realtime visualization of MCA data
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Environmental
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Housing
Carbon fiber; end caps: Anodized aluminum
System weight [Kg]
1.5
IPR
IP67
Power consumption
2.5W nominally, 6W peak
Temperature Range [°C]
-20 to +50
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Sensor Characteristics
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Crystal Type
Csl
Volume [ml]
100
Size [inch]
2x2
Resolution
<9% at 662 keV
PMT
SiPM
Magnetically Shielded
Y
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Electronics
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ADC
14 bit, 250Mhz
Energy response [keV]
30 to 3000
Excess energies
Summed in last channel
Channels [raw]
2048
Pulse shaping
Digital
Deadtime
zero
Baseline restoration
Digital
Pile-up rejection
Present
Sample rate [Hz]
0-10
I/O
Ethernet, RS232
Internal storage [GB]
32
Timestamp
GPS-based, world time
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Other specifications
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Calibration
Calibrated using Monte Carlo simulated response curves (MCNP). Absolute calibration against any geometry.
Post-processing
Comes with full-spectrum analysis software. Airborne correction suite: Elevation correction, Cosmic correction and Radon correction.